Guesthouses Used by Foreigners in Kabul Hit in Deadly Attacks

ALISSA J. RUBIN

Saturday

Feb 27, 2010 at 5:09 AM

At least 18 people were killed in the Afghan capital on Friday by several suicide bombers in attacks claimed by the Taliban.

KABUL, Afghanistan — A complex suicide and car-bomb attack in the heart of Kabul on Friday showed the continued ability of the Taliban to stage sophisticated operations in the heavily guarded capital, with the aim of undermining international support for the Afghan war.

The attack was directed at two guesthouses here favored by foreigners, killing at least 16 people, 9 of them Indians. The rest were an Italian, a Frenchman, three Afghan police officers and at least two people whose nationalities had not yet been identified.

While the Taliban denied that the attack had been aimed primarily at Indians, the toll spotlighted the prominent development role that India has played in the country, and prompted the Indian Foreign Ministry to charge that the assault had been aimed at its government.

Most of the foreigners killed were on aid missions here, working for nonprofit organizations.

The attack began a little after 6:30 on Friday morning when a powerful car bomb exploded outside the Hamid Guest House, used primarily by Indians. Minutes later, two heavily armed attackers wearing suicide vests stormed the Park Residence guesthouse across the street.

After police officers arrived at the scene, a gun battle raged off and on for more than two hours until officers succeeded in killing at least one of the suicide bombers. It was unclear if the other bomber set off his explosives in the Park Residence or was shot by the police.

“It was really a huge bombing; the one guesthouse completely collapsed,” said Zemary Bachery, the Interior Ministry spokesman. “It was completely surprising, such a target.”

“There had been no threats, this was a completely civilian target and some of the Indians who died, based on our information, were doctors working, extending services to poor Afghan children in desperate need of care,” he said.

The attack was the second major one in Kabul on a guesthouse used by foreigners. The first came in October, when a guesthouse used by United Nations international staff members was attacked by three gunmen, who killed five foreigners working with the organization. In the wake of that attack, the United Nations sent at least 300 of its staff members out of the country. Some have returned, but many are still working from Dubai.

It was also the third attack on Indian civilians in Afghanistan since 2008, when the Indian Embassy was first bombed; it was bombed a second time in 2009.

In a statement calling the attacks “heinous,” the Indian Foreign Ministry described them as “clearly aimed against the people of India and the people of Afghanistan.”

It added, “These are the handiwork of those who are desperate to undermine the friendship between India and Afghanistan, and do not wish to see a strong, democratic and pluralistic Afghanistan.”

The implication was that India’s archrival, Pakistan, was behind the attacks, although it was not mentioned by name. American intelligence officials have said the attack on the Indian Embassy in 2008 involved groups linked to the Pakistani intelligence services.

But Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, which claimed responsibility for the attack, said in an interview with The New York Times that the attack was aimed primarily at Europeans. He denied that there was any effort to interfere in the India-Pakistan relationship or that the explosions were timed to derail talks between the countries’ foreign ministers, which restarted Thursday.

“The actual target was European and Western foreign people who live in the Indian restaurant and the other hotel,” he said.

“The No. 1 target was not Indian, and the exact target was those foreign people whose troops are in Afghanistan and backing the cunning policy and the strategy of the American invaders,” Mr. Mujahid said.

Representatives from Britain, France and Italy all issued statements affirming their support for the NATO coalition’s fight against the Taliban.

Both guesthouses were in the central Kabul neighborhood of Shari Naw, just a few feet from the shopping and hotel complex known as the Kabul City Centre and Safi Landmark Hotel. Every window in the high-rise hotel was blown out and shattered glass covered the street below, crunching underfoot.

The two guesthouses were in even worse shape. Outside the Hamid Guest House, the car bomb left a crater 8 feet deep and more than 12 feet across. Across the street, the blast uprooted a hefty pine tree, which lay on its side on the muddy sidewalk.

At the Park Residence, the windows were blown out and the metal gates in front of the ground-floor shops, which had been locked for the weekly Friday holiday, were crumpled like aluminum foil.

Foreign residents of the Park Residence, Britons and Eastern Europeans who managed to escape, stood on the street outside as the gunfire crackled, looking stunned. They said they had been told not to speak to a reporter.

A receptionist, Manuwar Shah, who was in the hotel at the time of the attack, said he had heard and felt the bomb and dashed first into an inner room and then into the guesthouse basement. “I have been working here five or six years, and we were never a target,” he said.

The Indian citizens who died included people working on reconstruction projects and several doctors who had come to treat impoverished children at the Indira Gandhi Children’s Hospital, a pediatric center built by the Indian government, according to police officers at the scene.

The French victim was a 66-year-old documentary filmmaker, Severin Blanchet, according to the Paris-based group Ateliers de Varan — set up to help train filmmakers in the developing world.

Mr. Blanchet had traveled to Kabul 30 times since 2006 and helped local trainees make 18 films about Kabul’s children, according to an interview by Agence France-Presse with one of his colleagues in Paris.

The Italian killed was a diplomat, Pietro Antonio Colazza, according to Maurizio Massari, a spokesman for Italy’s Foreign Ministry. The Italian news agency ANSA reported that Mr. Colazza had been on the telephone with the Afghan police when he was shot by one of the suicide bombers who had entered the Park Residence.

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